10 Overrated Films from Recent Decades
1. Titanic - A fun spectacle to watch but just a cheesy rich girl, poor boy standard with an inflated budget.
2. Manchester by the Sea - Long, mopey, and depressing. This movie came off like Oscar bait (that the Academy bit on) by trying to be as melancholy as possible. Casey Affleck's legitimately pensive performance doesn't make up for Kenneth Lonergan's exhaustively boring storytelling.
3. Dances with Wolves - A sincere condemnation of our country's shameful history with Native Americans. There are some smart and entertaining moments but beating Goodfellas for Best Picture? I don't think so. Costner uses the voice over too much and the execution of the story is too self-important.
4. Flight - It's got an exhilarating beginning and a powerful ending but the middle is very dreary, dragging and lagging on a cautionary tale about alcoholism.
5. The Hurt Locker - An intelligent and important story that's pulled off in an uninteresting and unfocused way.
6. Avatar - A blatant rip off of Dances with Wolves (which was overrated to begin with, see above) with only one real distinction: This one has aliens, that one had Indians. That's about it.
7. Erin Brokovich - Felt more like an Oscar campaign for Julia Roberts than a legitimate story of anti-big business corruption. The constant aggrandizement of the titular (no pun intended) character instead of her cause, made the focus on more on Brokovich's nobility than why she was noble.
8. Shakespeare in Love - Clever as the script was, the love aspect was weak because Fiennes' Shakespeare wasn't that likable and easy to root for.
9. The Fast and the Furious (2001) - Not just the first film, which I felt was a poor man's Point Break, but the entire franchise has gone on too long pretending it invented the car chase scene.
10. Top Gun - A ham fest (even for the eighties) and so macho it borders on gay porn.